1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates generally to methods and systems for backing up data and, more particularly, a self protecting storage method and system for backing up data using a self archiving log structured volume.
2. Background Art
Conventional data backup is expensive, time consuming, and risky. Users spend much time and money installing, configuring, maintaining, and operating enterprise backup systems. Despite this effort, many users still lose valuable data because the needed file version or data base transaction has not been backed up or cannot be recovered in a reasonable amount of time.
Backed-up data is lost because of bandwidth constraints and administration errors. A conventional backup system competes for network and computational bandwidth that a user requires for other operations performed on a network. File activity and network traffic generated by a backup system can slow a network to a crawl. The need for around the clock networking operations has squeezed the time available for backup even further. Administrators must constantly trade off the risk of losing a file against data center response time. Backup system vendors have responded to this challenge by developing configuration options to wring the most performance out of the available bandwidth. These options provide some help to the bandwidth constraint problem, but increase the risk that a file may not be backed up at all due to an administrative error.
The risk of administrative error is compounded by the wide variety of computers, operating systems, software packages, file systems, and security domains that are present in a modern distributed network. Conventional backup systems have a client component that must abide by the native file systems' network protocols and security policies. Different software must be installed and configured for each variation. High performance systems must be adapted to the host hardware increasing both administrative expense and risk of mis-configuration. On top of all this, backups must be scheduled over a network where services may not be available at the time that they are needed. Each one of these complications adds to the risk that a file may not be backed up frequently enough or not backed up at all.
A further problem with conventional backup methods and systems is that they only periodically backup data. Thus, unlike data significant events, backups occur at fixed intervals and much important data may not be copied at all during the backup periods. Recreating data lost in the interim between backup periods is expensive.
Accordingly, what is needed is a method and system for backing up data that greatly reduces administrative expense and greatly increases the likelihood that a needed file version is available.